I don’t, of course, miss its nasty habits and I certainly have absolutely no appreciation of the time they tried to kill me.

Surely you recall all that sabre rattling in October 1962. Well, where I lived in Florida, I could actually hear it. As could every flip-flop-wearing kid in the region who suddenly saw the possibility of a Category 5 hurricane as mere nuisance compared to a 10-megaton nuclear air burst.

We may have lacked understanding of barometric fuses and beryllium triggers, but we knew that it wouldn’t take the best pitcher in the bullpen to hit us from an island then inconveniently located 140 miles to the south.

I can only thank the Christian-American God for not letting us know that those missiles were under the shaky control of two young Red Army officers and a nearly unhinged Fidel Castro.

Then there were the decades of “proxy wars” where we’d talk the leaders of certain nations (nations with no hope of ever fielding a good Winter Olympics team) into facing off with countries that were somehow enamored by what we affectionately called the Red Menace.

And they weren’t talking about Shriners in tiny cars. No, they were talking about the PR disaster that was the Ruskie leadership. With no free and democratic electoral process to enforce the buying of $200 haircuts, the thuggish Russian leaders terrified the world.

But why anybody would fight a proxy war for such unattractive men and for a centrally controlled economic system that made it so I could sell a pair of Levis in Bulgaria for $180 is beyond me.

And toilet paper. The entire Eastern bloc could get free medical care but they couldn’t get enough toilet paper. Bread at a discount yes, but toilet tissue and underwear no. Plus everybody had to learn to like ballet.

Then it all ended 20 years ago Monday, when formerly trigger-happy East German border guards stood around kicking at dirt in the wide mine fields as a happy crowd of whistling drunk people hammered away at the very steel-reinforced concrete that had for so long made me feel so safe.

That’s right, I saw that wall going up on TV in 1961 and it made me happy. They were on the other side of the thing and I was fine with that.

So maybe I didn’t have to worry about a suddenly reunited Germany in 1989, not when they had so many buildings to upgrade. This is never mentioned but, in addition to getting the East Germans to brutalize themselves, the Russians also sought to completely dishearten this once-prosperous and industrious people with buildings constructed entirely of Soviet concrete. Which was a mixture of straw, sand and spent uranium supported by special fast-rusting rebar.

Or that’s what it looked like to me when I visited my instantly beloved East Berlin in the early 1970s and saw a city like something straight out of “Dr. Zhivago.”

There and in trips across the now disappeared Eastern bloc I spoke to many young people who looked like me and acted like me (which is to say, kind of lame) only to find that they were just happy as heck that they were more or less under house arrest because, as one guy explained it, “Who needs to travel when everything good is already here?”

In my mind, everything about the Soviet Union was good and full of terrific anachronistic contrasts. Once, years ago, they mounted a huge show of goodwill in the L.A. Convention Center staffed by large, hard-eyed “goodwill guides” who looked for all the world like KGB-torturer types sent over from Central Casting.

They had vacuum tube TV sets the size of cathedrals and space vehicles riveted and welded like tanks and fashions straight out of a 1956 Sears catalog. The Russians had actually tried to outdo us junk-for-junk and they only managed to make us laugh.

And through it all I loved them. I loved them because they weren’t terribly good at anything beyond heavy-lift missiles and engineered athletes. I loved them because their leaders looked like farmers. I loved their always heroic 1930s-style art and their stupidly transparent propaganda.

Most of all, I loved and appreciated how they gave us something good to hate, something worthy of our hatred. I wasn’t alone in this. Going back to the Russian Revolution, the Soviets supplied the one solid fear that our politicians could use to terrify us.

And a people terrified will vote for just about anyone and anything if they think that it will make them safe.

There was us and there was them, the Russians, the Godless ones, which made our relationship even more satisfying. Being a religious nation, we could hate the Ruskies in a nondenominational way that smacked neither of bigotry nor racism.

We prayed for their conversion but knew in our heart of hearts that these Russians were only misinformed. We also knew, without ever admitting it, that the only people on this planet who loved us and our rampant consumerism were the Russians.

They envied our jeans, our houses, our cars and how we could buy shoes and porn at will. They held us and we held them in a comforting death embrace. Best of all, we knew where they lived. From a targeting perspective, we had the Kremlin’s home phone number and they had ours.

Through it all they gave us a reason to compete, to innovate, to keep off the flab and make the cradle of democracy look its very best.

And when it ended so suddenly the security of that mutually abusive relationship went with it. Only to be replaced after brief euphoria by an endless, soul-destroying war with religious fundamentalism, with forces invisible and fueled with implacable dark-ages hatred.

Face it, this new enemy isn’t nearly as good as the old one and neither – as a result – are we.